HSBC at the Singapore FinTech Festival – Day 4 & 5

Technology is transforming how money is managed, transactions are processed and international business is conducted. The many benefits that technology is already bringing to banking services was the topic of HSBC’s lab crawl discussions at the Singapore FinTech Festival.

Below is an overview of the key takeaways:

Several of our sessions, including “HSBC Digital Wealth Enhancements” and “Guide to Liquidity Management Dashboard and Cash Forecasting” focused on how going digital has benefitted the management of wealth and liquidity. New services have become available to support several key trends:

• Banks are looking to add more capabilities to mobile applications to improve the user experience for wealth management. Be it digital documentation, portfolio insights, analysis or in-application equity trading, systems are being built to ensure that the user experience is streamlined and convenient.
• With the ever-growing pace of market operations, leveraging technology to help clients make informed, data-driven decisions has never been more important. By leveraging our digital capabilities, HSBC offers a dashboard of visualised data to help clients better manage their liquidity and wealth.
• Forecasting has become more accessible with the adoption of digital tools. Banks are using analytics software to predict and identify liquidity trends and help clients understand their cash positions at a glance.

Companies of all sizes are looking for ways to become more efficient in their payment and collection capabilities. Our “Navigating Around HSBC’s Digital Accounts Receivables Tool (DART)” and “International Business for SME’s Made Simple and Secure (via Global Wallet)” sessions revolved around the tools SMEs and large corporates can use to do business effectively both domestically and as they look to expand internationally:

• In Singapore, an HSBC survey identified three key challenges facing SMEs, namely, changing client expectations, margin compression and rising costs while growing their businesses internationally. HSBC Global Wallet can help alleviate these challenges by enabling secure borderless transactions and real-time fund management.
• Banks are creating digital ecosystems that connect clients with distributors, retailers and buyers. Tools like HSBC’s DART are making the accounts receivable invoicing and payments processes quicker and more transparent for large corporates with complex needs.
• Multicurrency accounts via HSBC Global Wallet have made it possible to transfer funds in different currencies in a timely and secure manner. This is helping SMEs expand their businesses in different markets.
• Banks are evolving to support startups by offering ways to connect to a wider ecosystem of international partners, enabling seamless-cross border transactions and the delivery of practical advice.

Speed and security are important when making international payments and transactions. Our “Faster and Simpler International Payments with HSBC Global Money Transfers” and “Making Banking Invisible through Transactional FX” sessions reviewed what banks can do to improve cross border payments and transactional foreign exchange (FX) through technology enabled ecosystems:

• The lack of transparency is a common pain point in global payments. However, technology is enabling banks to provide detailed information on costs, FX rates and the time needed for transfers to reach beneficiaries across multiple currencies, helping clients make informed decisions.
• Another area of importance is the speed of transactions. To reduce processing times, banks are now tapping into innovative disbursement solutions and removing the need for intermediaries, allowing for faster transfers.
• In FX markets, industry collaborations are giving rise to overarching ecosystems that leverage API integrations. For HSBC’s clients, this makes it easier to access services such as bilateral FX and payables and receivables FX, made available through third-party platforms.

Our “Tokenisation Propelling Innovation at the Speed of Light” session discussed the value tokenisation is bringing to financial markets. The speakers also explored several of the new asset classes created via tokenisation as well as their advantages:

• Tokenisation has driven the development of digital assets, the next generation of asset representation. These new assets are essentially software programmes (tokens) residing in a distributed computer network.
• Digital assets are enabling fractional and trackable ownership of assets as well as decentralised finance models. Key to this trend is the programmability of these assets, which makes it possible to automate their trading.
• By collaborating with SGX, HSBC has pioneered the tokenisation of fixed income securities and is now working to extend that capability across additional asset classes and use cases. For these reasons, the emerging opportunity in bridging the gap between traditional and decentralised finance is significant.